


The Visitor

by zaffrin



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Confinement, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Panic Attacks, Prison, ansgst, brighter ending?, hints of depression, hopeful ending anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:55:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27797311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zaffrin/pseuds/zaffrin
Summary: He visits her sometimes, when she’s alone.Which is all of the time, of course, but it’s always when she’sfeelingthe most alone. She’ll turn round and he’ll be there, in the corner of her cell, his dark eyes on her, so achingly familiar even as this particular pair of them are still new.A short piece inspired by the trailer and the Doctor trapped in that cell.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Comments: 24
Kudos: 70





	The Visitor

**Author's Note:**

> Hi please read the tags for potential trigger warnings. Just a short thing I wrote after the trailer, it just got me thinking of the Doctor stuck in that cell and what that must be doing to her...

He visits her sometimes, when she’s alone.

Which is all of the time, of course, but it’s always when she’s _feeling_ the most alone. She’ll turn round and he’ll be there, in the corner of her cell, his dark eyes on her, so achingly familiar even as this particular pair of them are still new. 

Of course, it’s not _really_ him. But that hardly matters. Just means she’s free to take comfort from his presence, free to sit and talk with him, side by side on the cold floor, backs against the wall and knees drawn up. They talk nonsense sometimes, her sharing random thoughts and anecdotes and him listening patiently. Sometimes it’s more serious; her using him to sound out her fears and worries about how she was ever going to get out of here, running through ridiculous plan after plan that she knew would never work. Usually he listens patiently, but sometimes he mocks her for them, and that’s when she knows the idea is particularly outlandish. 

She tries to keep her spirits up, tries to wile away the time by thinking of the things she would do when she got out of here, and not focus on the despair that tries to creep it’s way in when each day brings her no closer to doing so. 

Sometimes, she gives in, and those times are when his presence is the most tangible. There’s a dip in the tiny hard mattress behind her where she lays curled on her side, and a hand rubs over her back as she cries. 

“It’ll be okay,” he murmurs to her on one such of these nights, gentle fingers stroking her hair back from her face, peeling strands from her damp cheeks, and it’s nothing like the Master at all but everything she needs in that moment, so she lets herself be comforted by it all the same.

Why has her mind decided to make her strange comfort illusion him? _Him_ of all people, who’s brought her nothing but stress and heartache for centuries, his real presence as far from comforting as can be? 

It wasn’t always like that though. Back when they were both children, centuries, millennia ago, he had been the one person she _did_ find comfort in - and he in her. There was a time when it felt like it was the two of them against the whole universe, and sometimes, when she forgets for just a minute that the man in her cell with her isn’t real, it feels like that again.

“How?” She rasps in reply to him, fists curled in a scratchy blanket, a wet path beneath her cheek. 

“You’ll get out of here,” he assures her, still stroking her hair. It’s dirty; the judoon are not generous with shower privileges and she can’t remember how many days or weeks it’s been since she was able to wash it - but the illusion Master doesn’t seem to care, carding his fingers through it gently in a comforting motion. 

“Will I?” She whispers. 

“Of course you will. You always find a way out. Always save the day. Even when it seems impossible.”

Her eyes well with fresh tears and she squeezes them shut. “Not always.”

“Hey,” he nudges her with his knee. “None of that. Remember London?”

She sniffs. She doesn’t want to talk, but she supposes it’s preferable to the dark thoughts creeping into the edges of her consciousness, threatening to pull her under. 

“London when? Not very specific.”

He chuckles softly, then proceeds to talk, voice low and quiet and soothing, reminding her of this time and that when it had seemed like everything was in the Master’s hands but she’d managed to foil him at the end of the day.

“That’s different,” she finally interrupts him. She’d turned onto her other side at some point, so she could watch his face as he talked, her fingers fiddling absently with the material of his shirt.

“Different how?”

“All those times were _you._ I _know_ you. I know how your mind works. This is… incomparable.”

“No it’s not,” he argues.

“It is. I’ve been through every single possible escape plan - nine thousand six hundred and thirty one… none of them will work.”

There’s a pause, before he smiles. “Then maybe you need to come up with nine thousand six hundred and thirty two.”

She sighs, shaking her head and closing her eyes. 

“Why are you here anyway?” She asks after a moment, opening them to look at him again.

“You needed me.”

She frowns. “You’re the last person I need.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. You… this isn’t you. You’re not like this.” She rolls onto her back, twisting round on the tiny cot to stare at the dark ceiling. “Not anymore.”

There’s a pause. “But you wish I was.”

The Doctor sighs. “Of course I do,” she answers softly after a moment, but when she turns her head to gauge his reaction, he is gone.

\--

Her hands are curled around the bars of her cell in the one tiny window she is afforded. They’re hot, some sort of pulse running through them that makes them glow, and she knows they will provide quite a shock should she attempt to yank them loose. She’d tried. For now, she uses the heat of the metal to ground herself, gripping to it like a lifeline with white knuckles as she frantically tries to count stars to distract herself from the panic rising inside her, curling up her spine. 

_You can breathe,_ she tells herself firmly as the space between gulps of air becomes shorter. She _knows_ that. Logically, she knows there is absolutely no reason why she can’t breathe properly, she knows how her lungs work, can feel that they _do_ still work properly, and knows her hearts are pumping blood round her body as surely as they ever had, although they are currently working alarmingly quickly. 

It feels like the walls of the cell are closing in on her, lines and tallys dancing around her head, threatening to pull her under. There’s so many of them now - too many. She’ll run out of space on the walls soon and then what will she do? She _has_ to keep her grip on time; it’s the only thing she has left in this place. 

“Ninety-three, ninety-four, ninety-five,” she whispers frantically, lips moving quickly as she tries to focus on stars that are starting to dance before her eyes, vision blurring. She takes in another gulp of air between ninety-six and ninety-seven, and it makes her head spin, makes her feel like she needs to take another straight away, but that one doesn’t feel like enough either, and her face is going numb, fingers tingling and what if she just drowned like this? In her cell, on too-thin air - nobody would ever know, nobody would ever even _care_ to find out - all of her friends think she’s already dead anyway so maybe it would be a relief to be free of it all - 

“You can breathe,” says a gentle, firm voice behind her, and then there’s a hand on her back, and her whole reality and sense comes rushing back in a wave that forces her to give a shaky exhale that clears some of the spinning fog in her head. “There,” he says, rubbing her back as her breathing starts to even out again, and her frantic heart-rate calms. “You’re stronger than this.”

The Doctor nods shakily, and her grip on the bars losens. The Master reaches round her, and gently pries her hands from them. Her palms are red, and he strokes his thumbs over them as the pins and needles in them dissipates. After a time, when her heartrates have returned almost to normal and she feels like she can breathe clearly again, she turns from the window and lifts her eyes to his. 

“Why are you here?” She asks him again, and rushes on when he opens his mouth to answer her how he usually does, clarifying; “Why are _you_ here?”

The Master closes his mouth, and looks back at her steadily. There’s a small smile on his lips that she doesn’t understand, but it’s not smug or mocking, just soft, almost… wistful. 

“What?” She frowns. 

“Haven’t you worked it out yet?” The Master says. “I’m the only one who knows you.”

Her frown deepens. “You don’t know me.”

He chuckles. “Oh but I _do._ I’m the only one who’s known you always; every you.”

“Not _every_ me,” she counters, a little spitefully.

He blinks, and then shrugs. “The same amount of yous that you remember yourself,” he says, and she averts her gaze, that statement ringing a little too true - reminding her of things she doesn’t want to think about. Not _today_ anyway, when her mind is fragile and vulnerable.

Fingers beneath her chin tilt it back up, and her eyes find the Master’s again. “And that’s all that really matters isn’t it?”

“I -”

“Remember who you are, Doctor,” he tells her. “You don’t give up.”

“I don’t,” she echos, voice lifted at the end like a question. 

Instead of replying, the Master simply raises his eyebrows at her, and something in his expectant expression makes the Doctor stand up straighter, and set her jaw in determination. “I don’t.” She repeats, firmer this time; a statement. 

“There you are,” the Master says, and she thinks he looks proud. 

He drops his hand and steps back, and the Doctor finds herself lurching forward, panic shooting through her at the thought of him vanishing -

“Stay with me!” She blurts out. 

“I’ll be here when you need me.”

“I need you now - please. Don’t leave me alone again.”

The Master tilts his head at her. “You are alone. You always have been.”

She blinks at him. “I…”

“You’re the Doctor.”

“I know that,” she frowns. 

“Good,” the Master says, then grins at her. “Then start acting like it.” He takes a step back, and raises a finger to make a point. “Nine thousand six hundred and thirty two.” He winks at her. “Feels like a lucky number.” 

The cell is empty again, but this time, when she sweeps her gaze around over the marked up walls, they don’t feel like they’re going to press in on her, and the marks she had made on them are a solid reminder of who she is and where and when, rather than a threat on her grip of reality. 

Nine thousand six hundred and thirty two… now she thought about it, it did feel kind lucky. Could be? Only one way to find out, she supposes. 

She had best get to work.

\--

**Author's Note:**

> Comments mean the world to me! <3


End file.
